White House Correspondence: Private v. Public or Paper v. Plastic?

The other day, I caught this article from Politico regarding House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman (R-Calif.) Darrell Issa's desire to get his committee's hands on White-House-generated emails, Facebook posts and Tweets. Nothing unusual about that, we would agree. But therein lies the rub; he wants personal emails, Facebook posts and Tweets.

Let's put Issa's political motivations aside for a moment and look at this objectively. I've certainly mentioned several times that the line between public and private is becoming more blurred by the day. None of us helps the cause, do we? We send public email from private accounts and private email from public accounts. Many people use Facebook for both private and public purposes with no separation whatsoever. Same with Twitter.

Hey, even in the accounting department, they know about the rules against commingling! The problem is, it's so easy to circumvent what would be normal auditing protocols, isn't it? And who wants to log into – and check – multiple accounts, anyway? Besides, as an example, you can use your Facebook account to log in to other resources, so why not? I could even do so to write this blog – if I had a Facebook account, that is…

That's what my headline means: It matters little whether you choose paper or plastic; either way, you're still transporting groceries…